Monday, December 01, 2008

Normalize Illumination

In addition to taking a look at crit talents, perhaps it is time that Illumination got normalized. Currently its effect varies wildly with the spell. With Flash of Light, a crit will restore 123 mana/sec. With Holy Light, a crit will restore 306 mana/sec.

Essentially, Illumination is almost three times as good with Holy Light than it is with Flash of Light.

I think Blizzard does not have an issue with paladins having really high crit rates on Flash of Light. Witness Sacred Shield, which gives the paladin an occasional 50% bonus to FoL crit rates. However, when Holy Light gets really high crit rates, things go crazy.

What I would suggest is weighting Illumination in favor of Flash of Light. Something like a FoL or Holy Shock crit returns 75% of the cost (153 mana/sec), but a HL crit only returns 30% of the cost (153 mana/sec).

(Numbers can be adjusted for balance. This is just a demonstration.)

Of course, Sanctified Illumination would be really bad, so that talent will have to be replaced. But the crit talents need to be looked at anyways.

14 comments:

I did a quick check at the talent trees for Holy and Ret, and what I saw was in the Ret tree, there was an 11% pure +crit, in the Holy tree there was 5% pure +crit, with an additional 6% for Holy Light and Holy Shock only (5% +crit on FoL, 11% +crit on HL/HS). Assuming you magically have all of those talents, that's 22% +crit max, half coming from Holy, half coming from Ret, and still less than 1/3 of the 70% crit rates.

This is primarily a gear issue, and "fixing" this by nerfing talents and abilities isn't going to solve the bigger problem of gear getting too powerful. Perhaps the easiest solution would be to adjust how many points of +crit give paladins 1% +crit for spells.

Two horrible possibilities spring to mind. One is an internal cooldown on Illumination. This would eviscerate it at low gear levels and lead to lengthy droughts/frequent OOM. Other is sort of a "Healing Vengeance" where crits add a stacking regen buff.

The hilarious part is balancing Holy Paladin itemization isn't all that tear jerking as only holy paladins use healing plate. It isn't like changing around the focus on crit would change anything for warriors or DKs (or other kinds of paladins).

In arena the problem isn't holy pallies going OOM, its all the other issues like silence, interrupt, mobility.

In raids, a holy pally spamming big heals is no threat to anyone else cause of mobility, single target, etc.

Also, since this has no effect on ret, there will be no nerf. Honestly, they don't care to much about any type of healer right now as long as they can keep the tank alive. DPS is goal #1 and I will laugh all the way to the bank when DKs get the $hit nerfed out of them.

Could you give an example of a Paladin with 70% crit I really don't think its possible unbuffed without sacrifing your stats somewhat (ie less Spell damage, Int, Haste as this was the case @ 70 it was possible to get a insane amount of crit but haste was the more desireable stat cause of high dps output of prenerf sunwell bosses) or being totaly overgeared in which case we would have to say wait for the Ulduar raid instance to see if it's OP or not.

Anyways I think your logic is flawed by saying Holy Light crits give you back more mana while totaly ignore the fact that Holy Light cost 1k more Mana than Flash. I also think that sacred shield was added to buff flash because flash just doesnt scale as well as holy light as your gear gets better (its big thing is mana efficentcy and as gear gets better efficency is less of an issue also lower spell coefficents hurts its scaling in comparrion to Holy Light)

Holy Light has always had an 6(11% if you kept 2pc T6) higher crit rate than Flash and the only thing WOTLK added was the ability to get an additional 8% crit From Ret Talents and the ability to get raid wide buffs (I Never got a moonkin aura or Ele shaman totems before 3.0 patch). Nothing huge yes we do see more crit rating on gear but its pretty much equivalent to how much crit you would get from level 70 gear with level 70 crit ratings. (like a t6 helm @ 70 had 1.6% crit and a Valor t7 Helm @ 80 has 1.1)

In short nothing has really changed Holy Light gets more mana back from crits cause you need to spend more mana to use Holy Light. If holy light got nerfed Paladins would be hesitant to use HL and an FoL Spamming paladin would probably be less desireable than any other healing class out there.

IF anything needs a nerf its Divine Plea with T7 Quality gear and 24k Buffed mana (not too hard to do) its 6k mana every minute or about 500mp5 for a minimal penalty for 15 seconds.

I guess the real problem is last night we worked on patchwork 25 man. The holy paladin put out 6k hps easy with 44% overheal and mostly didn't go OOM. The next best healer did under 3k hps. This will be nerfed.

You certainly get more mana back from Holy Light. But keep in mind that you spend more mana upfront as well. It's really just a different mechanic for a flat cost reduction - HL/FoL/HS have their cost reduced by 60% of your critical rate.

The only 'normalization' that would really need to occur is with regards to the Illumination/Divine Illumination interaction.

Per cast HL restores more, but what about over time? For every HL you can cast 1 and 2/3 FoLs, bringing the regen to 206 per time of FoL and 306 per time of HL. Add in that with sacred shield FoL will be critting a lot more, say 35% vs. 85%, roughly. That's over double the number of crits, meaning double the regen per time, and FoL is actually giving back more mana than HL.

I knew I should have included my standard disclaimer "unless there was something I missed"

Still, looking at the mana/second isn't really the best way to go about it. It doesn't matter how much mana a heal regens, it matters how much it drains. How does the rate of mana loss and healing output compare to the mana loss and healing output on HL? That's mostly rhetorical. It might work to think of HL and FoL as equal heals, but situational. So HL drains faster, but also heals faster. Or it might work to look at efficiency vs. output. Or get really complex and try to mix together efficiency, mana drain, and healing output.

With this we could see FoL as efficient with a low drain, but also a low output. HL would be high drain, low efficiency, and high output. Where should that put HS? Maybe stick it in the middle as a moderator, giving medium drain, output, and efficiency. That way it would give a middle ground and allow for a more gradual shift from FoL to HL without a total switch of spell qualities.